BKUNIX

Somehow on my trying to remember how to enable scsi on the i386 qemu, I came across this fun project… Bkunix. No it’s *NOT* BURGER KING Unix… But rather a port of LSX-UNIX to the Soviet Elektronika BK computer.

The BK’s were sold as personal computers in the Soviet Union, and were cloned from the DEC LSI PDP11’s.

Later on, with the source being available, a project has been started by Sergey Vakulenko and Leonid Broukhis to port the LSX to the BK’s. What is neat about this, is that the entire system is built with a set of cross tools, to produce the kernel & userland utilities.

And the best part is that you can run it in an emulator! You can download it here. Just don’t over expect the MINI & LSX UNIX’s were meant to run on tiny machines with as little as 40kb of ram. However given such a small constraint, it’s very impressive to see it in operation.

I've always been interested in those old soviet style machines, in how they built them, and go them to run… Have you heard of the Cuckoo's egg? It was an interesting story of how the KGB got this kid in east germany to spy in the states… It's a fun read, and it hinges around a way to backdoor 4.2 BSD via emacs.